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When I talk about this, I’m speaking for myself. My thoughts may not be the same as yours. For this, please do not condemn me for thinking differently.

Before I became a self-sabotaging romantic, I was a self-assured naive girlfriend. I had this imagination that my boyfriend would forever love me and only me. I always believed that they were incapable of making me feel anything other than happiness. Sure I had friends who would tell me what assholes their guys would be, but I was in this little bubble of conviction that that would never happen to me. It took me two cheating ex-boyfriends to realize how dead wrong I was.

The first one constantly cheated on me for the three years we were together. And the second one slept with my close friend right under my nose, and eventually made her his wife. It’s a miracle I allowed myself to fall for a third guy. You don’t go through these without changing. The type of change that alters how you see the word “Love”. I have a serious case of confusing instinct with paranoia and it’s no fun at all. I wish I could back to not-knowing. It won’t spare me from the pain but at least I’d be able to save myself some sleepless nights.

How exactly do you push past the pain and trauma of having someone cheat on you? How do you make yourself forget the helplessness you felt at that moment of discovery? How do you stop yourself from misplacing the distrust on your current flame and allow yourself again to trust completely? How do you convince yourself that this story is different and that this isnt a cycle of love and hurt?

I don’t have the answers. I always hoped that time would prove to be the best medicine. But it has been 2 years but there are still times when the wounds still throb as painfully as it did before. If there were a shortcut, I’d gladly be the first in line to take it. True that we learn to move on, but the scars never go. The change is permanent, you can’t take it back and wish for a forgetting potion. A photo or a song or even a mobile ringtone can flip a switch in your brain and make all those emotional trauma come tumbling out. Somehow, your heart never returns to what it was. It stays broken. It only gets broken into even smaller pieces when you get hurt again.

But pain is inevitble, for in it can we only truly understand what love is. To be broken is needed, for us to understand what being whole means. To trust again and offer what remains of our hearts to another person with full hope that they won’t do again what was done to it before is the exact definition of love. The aftermaths of a heartbreak cannot be controlled; we change differently. What remains true is that people still fall in love no matter what. It’s human nature to be so weak yet be that strong.